Summary

Remoting is a powerful technology that provides many of the capabilities of Web Services and DCOM, plus some new capabilities of its own. Using remoting, you can create both Windows and Web applications that interact with objects on an application server across the network.

On the server you can create SingleCall, Singleton, and Activated objects. These three object types provide a great deal of flexibility in terms of n-tier application design and should be able to meet almost any need. SingleCall gives you behavior similar to Web Services or typical COM+ objects. Activated gives you objects that act similar to COM objects exposed via DCOM. Singleton objects are unique to remoting and enable all your clients to share a single stateful object on the server.

You can also create Serializable objects, which can move from machine to machine as needed. Using this type of object enables you to easily move data and business logic from server to client and back again. This technology is particularly exciting for object-oriented development in a distributed environment.

In this chapter, you created a library DLL and exposed it to clients from both a custom and IIS remoting host. You then created client applications to use your server-side code by referencing the library DLL directly, using an interface DLL and using the soapsuds.exe utility to create a proxy DLL. These techniques apply not only to SingleCall objects but also to Singleton and Activated objects, so you should have a good grounding in the techniques available for using remoting in your environment.